April 2013 Compositing Reel

Detail

Breakdown:

Unfortunately, only final renders were made available for many of the shots shown in the reel, so animated breakdowns were not possible to include for many shots. Some shots were not made available at all, and to my regret, are not shown in this reel. I will describe what you are seeing for the various shots I was able to include.

Stereo conversion work: Stereo work should be viewed as a special type of compositing, with its own unique challenges, involving heavy paint and roto work. We were tasked with taking completed shots, pulling them apart into several layers, and reassembling them, often requiring extensive paint work to fix edge issues and missing information behind objects. What you are seeing in the shots from these shows is one eye from a stereo pair, which have been taken apart, distorted to create false parallax, and reintegrated. Work primarily done in Fusion.

Extracted:

Mono Compositing - Picket Fence Shots: This independent feature film was about a man trapped in the memories of another man. The picket fence represented the "boundaries" of a given memory. There were very many of these hand-held shots that included portions of a fence that needed to be completed, as well as the "forcefield" effect created, using 3D camera tracks to match-move the elements. The shot at the window in particular was originally a hand-held but otherwise motionless shot that needed the forcefield added. I offered to add an extra cinematic touch to the shot by adding a slow pull out, to slowly reveal the forcefield. This was achieved by painting out the fence, projecting the fence and the house onto simple geometry, and using the 3D tracked camera to add motion to the camera.

Mono Compositing - Clock/Radio Shots: Our hero is in a memory where the current time was forgotten, so the director called for the clock to flip around constantly to random numbers. The clock radio originally showed 12:00 AM while shooting. I built an LED "rig" in Nuke that would create numbers that matched the shape and color of the original clock, as well as the subtle alternating flicker in the various LEDs. When you see the clock in motion, you can see the distorted display, where parts of the numbers "lag" behind other parts, an effect that occurred in-camera with the original clock. There were also no tracking markers placed, so it had to be tracked manually.

Bad Universe

Mono Compositing: This was a short-lived, 3-episode test run for a new television show on the Discovery Channel, which featured various ways the world could end. It had different segments representing the exaggerated apocalyptic scenarios of the movies, and segments meant to be a more realistic take on how the events could happen. The episode pictured was about an alien invasion, and featured several dozen shots of large "flying saucers" entering the atmosphere and wreaking havoc over Los Angeles. This shot used several techniques for extracting mattes from the windows, as well as distorting and integrating the ship to make it look like it truly was a reflection in the window. This breakdown was used on the company's reel for some time afterward.

Macro LCD Slate:

Created entirely from scratch in Nuke.

For more information about the shots or the breakdowns, please e-mail me here.